Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2015

Tiny Mix Tapes' Favorite 50 Music Releases of 2015

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50.

Lotic - Agitations
November 13, 2015
Critic Score
82
3 reviews

49.

February 9, 2015
Critic Score
81
5 reviews

13 Moons is a celebration of fading detail, a reminder that we’ll only ever continue to forget.

48.

March 24, 2015
Critic Score
66
18 reviews

46.

Dr. Yen Lo - Days With Dr. Yen Lo
May 16, 2015
Critic Score
81
5 reviews

A how-to manual coded in appropriated propaganda, Days With Dr. Yen Lo challenges Ka’s followers to not only read between the lines of hip-hop’s collective subconscious, but to also color outside of them.

45.

March 24, 2015
Critic Score
81
6 reviews

By prioritizing rhythm over hooks, by turning away from looped vocal samples and toward a starker, more tensile vocabulary of snares and strings, Dark Energy immediately sounds like a benchmark, an outlier in terms of minimalist abstraction and intensity.

44.

December 15, 2014
Critic Score
92
31 reviews

D’angelo’s music is soul against evil. Murder, racism, violence, oppression, hatred: Black Messiah is protest music, healing music, a bomb and a balm.

43.

Food Court - Food Court
February 16, 2015
Critic Score
100
1 review

42.

Ben Zimmerman - The Baltika Years
June 9, 2015
Critic Score
90
1 review

41.

DJ Nigga Fox - Noite E Dia
March 23, 2015
Critic Score
84
2 reviews

40.

Chicklette - UNFAITHFUL
February 17, 2015
Critic Score
90
1 review

39.

January 27, 2015
Critic Score
80
4 reviews

38.

Amnesia Scanner - Angels Rig Hook
February 26, 2015
Critic Score
80
1 review

37.

October 2, 2015
Critic Score
75
15 reviews

Age of Transparency is heady and dizzying, even more unpleasant than Anxiety at times, but it’s keyed in to the zeitgeist in a way that feels genuine, constructive even.

36.

Lolina - RELAXIN' With Lolina
March 10, 2015
Critic Score
70
1 review

35.

May 19, 2015
Critic Score
79
29 reviews
Holly Herndon’s latest collection of avant-garde electronic music is smart, innovative, politically urgent, and very, very sensual.

34.

October 20, 2015
Critic Score
79
2 reviews

RIP Chrysalis is dripping with imagination: its moments sound like the first time.

32.

Giant Claw - Deep Thoughts
November 6, 2015
Critic Score
70
2 reviews

31.

November 6, 2015
Critic Score
84
36 reviews
With pacing like a serial manga franchise, the album shines through its relentless ability to grow on you, despite all odds.

30.

September 25, 2015
Critic Score
75
17 reviews

Half Free is a dudless, succinct record with nonetheless staggering scope.

28.

May 12, 2015
Critic Score
80
11 reviews
The album is dripping in homage to power electronics, harsh noise, and ambient synth music; it’s a combination of influences that have been explored to varying extents throughout his back catalogue, and it’s been done here to impeccable effect.

27.

July 24, 2015
Critic Score
82
6 reviews

With Piteous Gate, you hear an artist becoming strong to themselves, not as a strong icon or representation, but as a capable force across industrialized identities, one who extracts dances from the cosmos.

26.

Fourth World Magazine - Pinhead in Fantasia
November 6, 2014
Critic Score
100
1 review

25.

February 3, 2015
Critic Score
77
9 reviews

COIN COIN Chapter Three: river run thee is infinite and indispensable in its cultural worth and true-ly timeless and comprehensive in its scope. A masterwork of human history, still in progress.

24.

May 29, 2015
Critic Score
85
2 reviews

23.

June 9, 2015
Critic Score
79
27 reviews
Each piece makes for a beautiful, unceremonious introduction to the otherwise private and sensitive world Hval has always dared to define.

22.

September 4, 2015
Critic Score
73
12 reviews

Sometimes you have a dream and it’s not bad. It’s not wish-fulfillment, but you feel more alive for having had it. The memory of the dream’s worth nothing, but you’ll chase the feeling all day. This album is a lot like that.

21.

D/P/I - Ad Hocc
April 10, 2015
Critic Score
90
1 review

20.

January 15, 2015
Critic Score
82
6 reviews

Blackheart is ongoing and nearly seamless, unselfconscious in its refashioning of 80s guitar licks, steel drums, 256-bit EDM, flutes, and trap snares.

18.

April 29, 2015
Critic Score
80
2 reviews

THIRD SIDE OF TAPE is not preoccupied with an attempt at being something specific; it is what it is: a collection of raw statements that aren’t perturbed by what they are saying, but simply that they are saying.

17.

Ahnnu - Perception
April 7, 2015
Critic Score
90
1 review

16.

June 8, 2015
Critic Score
81
7 reviews

As last year’s attention-grabbing Adhesive EP intimated, the new Container is a richly rhythmic powerhouse of gleeful propulsion. The beats trump everything, including the tones that are so overdriven they might as well be more beats.

15.

October 23, 2015
Critic Score
89
43 reviews

Divers is, to greatly oversimplify its project and to mention only one of its many mythic frames of reference, about the fall and redemption of humanity. That divine catastrophe is scaled down to the commonly human quantity of the sensible work of art, rich in emotional honesty and poetic complexity.

14.

February 12, 2015
Critic Score
76
30 reviews

With If You’re Reading This, there is union between his effort to “mythologically aggrandize” himself and to relieve creative pressure by half-redundantly (and “meaningfully”) delivering what people what: Drake content, Drake lyrics, Drake beats… a Drake album.

13.

April 1, 2015
Critic Score
85
2 reviews

12.

Beat Detectives - Boogie Chillen / The Hills of Cypress
May 25, 2015
Critic Score
100
1 review

11.

September 25, 2015
Critic Score
88
37 reviews

Have You In My Wilderness is all about walking away and looking back, the content of desire and its form, the voice in search of clarifying itself.

10.

November 27, 2015
Critic Score
77
25 reviews

SOPHIE’S PRODUCT relies on amiable, nonchalant, subconscious confusion.

9.

January 20, 2015
Critic Score
85
41 reviews
This is music that gnaws at your bones. And make no mistake, this is every second Björk’s album. And it is nothing short of breathtaking.

8.

July 17, 2015
Critic Score
78
19 reviews

DS2 finds a hellish, motivating power by articulating how it’s possible to have the best time of your life during the worst time of your life. And it all sounds so good.

7.

March 31, 2015
Critic Score
91
47 reviews

[Church Service Meme]

5.

November 13, 2015
Critic Score
78
32 reviews

If anything, Garden of Delete showcases how fragile the genre, the signifier, the “culture” is in 2015.

4.

March 15, 2015
Critic Score
95
45 reviews

Underlying To Pimp a Butterfly’s system of contradictions is a narrative of hope against the brutality of the systematic destruction of the unity of the culture, the murderous cops and the drug wars — that hope is in the possibilities of consciousness, that ever elusive revolutionary power that makes us all rulers of this world.

3.

James Ferraro - Skid Row
November 13, 2015
Critic Score
69
5 reviews

2.

April 16, 2015
Critic Score
70
14 reviews

Regardless of the form, Barter 6 offers a fantastic explication of the capabilities Thug has been honing — the capabilities of liminality.

1.

November 20, 2015
Critic Score
77
24 reviews
Perhaps through his relentless work output, Arca has transcended the limitations of digital structure to arrive at fluid alien-jazz.
Original Source: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2015-favorite-50-music-releases
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